


Apt Pupils

by dotfic



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-07-14
Updated: 2007-07-14
Packaged: 2017-10-29 16:29:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/321844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dotfic/pseuds/dotfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Six times the Winchesters taught each other something that apparently had nothing to do with hunting, but it turned out it actually did.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Apt Pupils

**Author's Note:**

> a/n: Written for [](http://eloise-bright.livejournal.com/profile)[**eloise_bright**](http://eloise-bright.livejournal.com/) 's birthday. Thank you to [](http://amchara.livejournal.com/profile)[**amchara**](http://amchara.livejournal.com/) for the insightful beta read.

  
**One - Blending in**

"The key is not to draw attention to yourself, but don't _look_ like you're not drawing attention to yourself," Dean mutters in a low voice.

On the big screen ten rows up from them the end credits finish rolling. The house lights are up and the thick scent of buttered popcorn is making Sam's stomach growl. They finished their popcorn halfway through _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_.

"Right." Sam nods even though he's not sure he fully understands.

Dean glances around the theater like he's James Bond or something. "Follow my lead." He gets up and moves sideways out to the aisle, adjusting his baseball cap, which he's wearing with brim turned around backwards.

Sam follows. There's an usher starting to pick up trash, but Dean doesn't even look at the guy, yet seems aware of him as he goes up the aisle. Sam can tell by a certain tension in Dean's shoulders, the way he's walking fast but not too fast, eyes straight ahead.

They step out into the lobby of the multiplex and Dean stops to drink water from the fountain, kneels to tie his shoe, pokes Sam to do the same.

When there are no uniformed theater employees left in sight, Dean nudges Sam and jerks his head towards the showing of _Batman Returns_.

Sam tries to mimic Dean's walk that's almost a saunter but more restrained; not like he owns the place but like he _belongs_ , his sneakers making no sound on the carpet. Taking a deep breath, Sam ignores the fast thud of his heart as he follows his big brother through the doors of screening room seven into the sound and darkness. The movie's already in progress, the theater half-full; they find seats with no trouble.

In the flickering shadows, Dean's grin is triumphant, while Sam slumps in his seat. It takes him twenty minutes before he stops expecting a heavy hand to come down on his shoulder -- _gotcha!_ \-- but then he gets into the story.

~*~*~

Across the warehouse floor, he can see Dean curled up and still, hands tied behind his back, caught in a rectangle of sunlight. There's no visible sign of injury and his chest rises and falls with normal breaths, but his eyes are closed.

The creatures sleep during the day. Sam works his way through them, stepping softly, salt gun gripped in his hand. The sound of their breathing surrounds him. He tries to walk without drawing attention to himself, like he belongs, making himself invisible in plain sight.

It works, and he reaches his brother's side.

  


~*~*~

  
 **Two - Walk before you can run**

"You can do it. That's right, walk to Daddy. Walk to Daddy."

John crouches on the living room floor, arms extended towards his small son; Dean's chubby hands grip the edge of the coffee table.

"That's it. You can do it, Dean-o."

"Go to Daddy," Mary whispers, leaning down, her yellow hair loose, falling to brush the sofa cushions. Her face is joyful and eager as she points at John.

Shirtless, diaper sagging, Dean turns to look up at her, forehead creasing with uncertainty. She smiles, Dean smiles back, and John feels like someone turned on four more lamps in the living room. At the same time he lowers his arms, fearful that Dean won't walk to him. Maybe Mary should do this. She was better with kids, patient, soft-spoken, knew how to talk to them like they were people.

"Hey, Dean," he says. "Hey." Soft and coaxing, like Mary.

The little body jogs up and down, a dance of excitement and indecision as he keeps his grip on the coffee table.

Dean had learned to crawl early, scooting around at alarming speed, getting into anything and everything; he and Mary were terrified he'd hurt himself or eat soap. Then Dean could stand up if one of them held his arms; then he was standing on his own but kept falling over, but he'd been getting better at it the last few days, able to take one step, two, three, before toppling. Dean never cried when he fell, only frowned before pushing himself back up. They'd practiced walking, John holding Dean's arms up, helping him take one step at a time, his small feet standing on John's sneakers.

Letting go of the coffee table, Dean stops jiggling up and down in place, then takes one step, two, three, four. Mary's indrawn breath of delight is audible over the background evening noises of the neighborhood coming in through the window: crickets, soft front porch chatter, the Thompson kid playing halting scales on the piano.

Five, six. It seems to happen all in a rush, Dean wobbling towards him, right into his arms. John sweeps him up into a hug. "Atta boy. That's my good boy."

~*~*~

Years later, John remembers that moment, watching his boy lift a shotgun to his shoulder for the first time, wondering how they got from six steps across the living room carpet to here.

  


~*~*~

  
 **Three - Hunter's gambit**

Thunder rumbles, and then the first big drops start to spatter the windows of the two-room cabin. John glances up as lightning flickers, thinking of Dean driving on the slick, wet roads. The kitchen light burns over his head, the only light they've got turned on. Night had come on fast, sunset lost in the storm clouds.

"He'll be fine, Dad." Sam drops something down on the small round table, a shoe box and a folded board. "He's a good driver. It's not like a rainstorm would keep Dean from going out on a date anyway."

"True." John pulls his coffee mug, still warm, towards him across the battered white-painted wood. "What's that?"

In answer, Sam opens the lid of the shoebox and pulls out a piece carved into the shape of a horse's head. "Chess. I was wondering..." he sits down slowly in the chair opposite John and bites his lip before continuing. "I was wondering if you'd play with me?"

"Son, I'd like to, but I don't know how to play chess."

Sam's hazel eyes widen, flaring brighter for a moment in a flash of lightning. "You don't? But you know all kinds of stuff." Sam frowns.

John knows how to play poker, and pool, and baseball, and there was one guy in 'Nam who even taught the guys pinochle while they were holed up during a monsoon. But never chess, and once he started hunting, it hardly seemed important anymore.

"How do _you_ know how to play?" John picks up a castle-shaped piece and turns it over in his fingers, liking the smoothness of the sides, the bumpiness on top.

"This kid at school taught me. Billy. He loaned me his set so I could practice. But practice is easier with someone, and Dean says he's too busy."

"Hm." John strokes a knuckle across his chin. "Good strategy game, chess. All right, Sammy, you show me."

The smile lights up his boy's face, just like Mary, as the lightning flashes again, outlining Sam's gangly form and turning him into all angles and shadows. He unfolds the board, and takes the scuffed wooden pieces out one at a time, explaining how each can move.

  


~*~*~

The demon's child pins up him against the wall. It scrapes painfully against his back. John grimaces, feet dangling as he fights the invisible force that holds him, furious at his own helplessness, his mind groping for a Latin incantation, but his mouth can't seem to form the words. The boy's smile is devouring and cold; the pain intensifies.

Beneath the fear and anger, John keeps a pocket of secret triumph.

He's just the pawn; his two knights are elsewhere, waiting to put that yellow-eyed bastard in check.

  


~*~*~

  
 **Four - It's all in the wrist**

Sam's steps drag as he trails in Dad's wake. The one time Dad actually makes it to one of his games instead of Dean, and he bombs. He keeps his eyes down on the cracks in the sidewalk, thinking of the rhyme the other kids sometimes chant that he hates so much: _step on a crack, break your mother's back._

Tucking his baseball glove under his arm, Sam steps on all the cracks, because it doesn't matter, not in his case, and they're stupid, meaningless words anyway.

It's a warm spring day and trees are blooming all over town, petals falling like snow. Sam looks up at his father's back. He's not sure if Dad's pissed off or not. He doesn't seem mad, but sometimes it was hard to tell; but Dad never got mad about stuff like baseball games, or if Sam brought home a B instead of an A. Dad only got mad about grades if they brought home D's.

That doesn't make him feel any better, though. He still screwed up.

They reach the corner and Dad stops and puts his hand on the back of Sam's head, turning it so Sam has to look up at him, squinting against the slanting afternoon sun. "You okay, kiddo?"

"Yeah." Sam pulls out of Dad's grasp and looks down at the sidewalk cracks again.

He hears Dad heave a sigh, and then he's kneeling in front of him on the curb. "Your coach is a nice guy, Sam. Real nice." Then Dad reaches for the baseball glove and takes the ball out that Sam has tucked inside. "But he didn't tell you squat about how to hold a baseball."

"Huh?"

"Come with me."

Across the street, there's a field that seems to be of no use to anyone, where the grass hasn't grown too tall because there's rubble mixed with the dirt; Sam guesses there must have been a building there once.

They go out into the middle of the field and Dad takes his hand and closes it around the ball. "You see the seams? Make sure you're gripping the ball across the seams. No, like this." Dad adjusts Sam's fingers. "Don't let it rest back in your palm, though -- keep it in the tips of your fingers. Most kids your age can't do that, but you've got big hands."

Sam tries to do it like Dad says.

"Let me see you throw it."

Sam does, and the ball lands, bouncing against the rubble. Dad jogs over, picks it up, and brings it back. "Your wrist is too stiff." He puts the ball into Sam's hand again, then takes Sam's wrist in his fingers, and wobbles it. "Use your wrist. The wrist matters."

The ache of disappointment in Sam's chest is fading. Dad spends so much time teaching them stuff about guns, rock salt, incantations. If he's taking a moment now to bother showing Sam anything about baseball, Sam figures he can't be that bad at it.

They stay in the field until sunset, until Sam can throw the ball all the way to the other side to hit the beat-up fence.

~*~*~

The bugbears are getting away. Dean's around the other side of the house.

"Dean!" Sam shouts a warning.

The critters are bounding across the lawn, cackling, headed for the woods, and if they reach them it'll be a bitch to track them down.

Sam reaches into his backpack and takes out one of a half-dozen bottles filled with holy water. They're made of sugar glass, designed to shatter easily. Dean snagged the bottles from somewhere, either lifted them or bought them, Sam doesn't think about which. He draws back his arm, and throws.

Bulls-eye. Water splatters on two of the creatures, their skin starting to smoke as they shriek in pain. Sam grabs another bottle and hurls it with swift precision and two more are down. The third one finishes them off.

 _Use your wrist. The wrist matters._

  


~*~*~

  
 **Five - In the mind's eye**

When John emerges from the bathroom in ratty sweatpants and his Marine t-shirt, Sam is asleep and Dean's seated cross-legged on the bed nearest the door. His eyes are squeezed shut so tight it's like he's trying to make his ears pop off.

"Hey, kiddo, whatcha doing?" He sits down beside his son. John's hair is still damp from the shower, and he scrubs at it with his fingers, trying to shake off the excess water.

Dean's eyes stay shut. "Visiting Mommy."

John's stomach lurches. "Is that so?"

It's been a year and four months, and her face is still the first thing he thinks of when he wakes up in the morning. He'd almost rather forget, only not really.

"Uh-huh." His son nods. When John reaches out to brush the hair back from Dean's forehead, he opens his eyes. "You want me to show you how to do it?"

"Nah. I think I already do."

Dean shakes his head. "To really, _really_ see her you gotta close your eyes tight, Daddy. Like this." And Dean demonstrates the scrunched-tight, ears-ready-to-pop-off-face again. "Not just 'membering. _Seeing_."

Safely tucked in his crib at the foot of John's bed, Sam makes soft sounds in his sleep, nonsense syllables, nothing distressed. John wonders what Dean's getting at. Kids get weird ideas sometimes.

"Dean." John puts his hand on the back of his boy's head. "You don't have to do that to remember her."

"But I can see her _sharp_ when I do it. Realer." He opens his eyes, then gets up on his knees and puts his hands on John's shoulders. "You try it, Daddy," he says, eyes serious.

There's no getting out of it.

John shuts his eyes tight and concentrates.

~*~*~

Hell stinks. Literally. Sulfur, scorched flesh, rotted things. It's noisy, too, screams, howls and shrieks, not only of the tormented souls but of their tormentors. The reason the word _bedlam_ is so very useful.

John feels the line of his sanity retreating; soon it will pull in so tight it'll cut him in two and he'll lose himself.

He shuts his eyes tight against the heat and the smell and sees his sons: Sam's ridiculous height, his expression mobile as a child's one moment, tired and wise as a middle-aged man's the next. Dean's triumphant grin after he's torched something nasty; the hard set of his jaw when he holds the Colt.

The line retreats, and John can breathe again.

  


~*~*~

  
 **Six - Sigils and scribbles**

"This shit makes no sense!"

Dean flings his pencil across the kitchen. When the point hits the wall, leaving a dark smudge, he feels a sense of grim satisfaction he knows is childish. The mark will erase easy. The same can't be said for the pages in his spiral notebook, crossed out, erased, scribbled over. He's sick of the sight of it. It usually takes him twenty minutes, half an hour tops, to finish an assignment, if he doesn't sweat accuracy; and he somehow gets most of the questions right anyway.

At least, until now.

Lifting his head from his American history textbook, Sam stares at him, mouth open. He studies Dean until Dean almost squirms in his chair. "What're you working on?" Sam asks.

"A complete waste of time, that's what I'm working on." He scoots his chair back and props his boots up on the kitchen table.

Sam squints and leans over to see, but Dean puts his hand protectively over his papers. "It's Algebra, mister nosy pants." Dean watches Sam's head bend over his textbook again. Brainy as he is, Sam doesn't know how to do Algebra yet, and won't for a few years.

He should blow off this studying crap, go out, buy himself some soda and chips, and head down to the river. There's a dilapidated stone wall where he likes to sit and watch the boats.

"You're trying too hard," Sam says.

"What?" Dean lowers his boots to the wooden floor with a loud thump.

Sam looks up from his textbook again. "Sometimes if you slow down and try the problem another way, it gets better. But if you try to get through all the problems really fast, you'll get frustrated."

"Who told you that?" Dean asks, wondering if it was Dad, but it doesn't sound like him.

Shrugging, Sam turns over a page. "Nobody. It's something I kind of...do...sometimes... and it works. Maybe if you looked at it upside-down."

"Yeah. Right." Dean flips another pencil into the air and catches it. Flips it again, and it flies into the sink with a clatter.

"Try using a fresh page," Sam says, keeping his eyes down over the text.

He knows Sam's better at studying than him, even if he doesn't know as much. Dean rips the used pages out of the notebook and starts on a fresh one. He copies down the first problem, stares at it, then turns the notebook around and looks at the problem upside down. Nothing.

"Crap." He flings down the pencil, wondering if breaking it in half would help. "Screw this. I'm going out." Sam's head goes up. "Don't look at me like that," Dean says, rising from his chair. "Look, I'm just not good at school. I'm not smart enough for this shit."

"Yes you are," Sam says, and seems as startled as Dean is at the fierceness in his voice. "Smarter."

After a moment, Dean sits back down at the table, takes a few deep breaths, and tries again.

~*~*~

The incantation is a messy mix of several languages, some living, some dead, and the pages of the book are so brown and cracked Dean can barely make out the patterns of the sigil.

He crouches on the floor, rug rolled back, chalk in one hand, book open on the floor beside his boot.

This has to be right; this is his part of the job and if he gets it wrong, Dad's screwed.

If Sam was here he'd...but Sam is a thousand miles away and so Dean is it.

He pauses, purses his lips. Then Dean turns the book around so he's looking at the sigils upside-down.

Half an hour later he finishes his practice run, looks down at the circles and lines he's made in chalk, and thinks that when it's time to do the real thing tonight, he'll be ready.

  
~end


End file.
